He shot a cop. Did his time. And now wants to make amends. (A fresh, moving look at Restorative Justice.)
Dean Stanbury aka Stana was a bad-boy gangster and grime rapper growing up in East London. Then one fateful day in 2006 he shot and wounded a police officer.
Dean was running away and fired over his shoulder. He did 8 years in jail, coming out a changed man. He now wants to track down the officer he shot and express his remorse and regret, check he is OK, and apologise to him face to face for what he did.
Will Dean be able to find him after all these years? What will the policeman say, how will he react?
In the process Dean re-visits his past to work out how he became the man capable of pulling the trigger that day. Dean now has young children of his own. He is working on new lyrics to reflect his new values and discourage young men like he once was from glamorising guns, crime and life on the street.
What makes this film stand out is that it is a tale of Restorative Justice told from the inside (as opposed to TV people pitching up and looking in on this world).
The director of ‘Sorry I Shot You’ has previously done two stretches inside Holloway women’s prison for gang-related offences before finding her way back to the straight and narrow, including directing this her first film. Because she is a close relative of Dean Stanbury and has his full trust, the film is astonishingly intimate.
‘Sorry I Shot You’ is an extraordinary, uplifting documentary about redemption and second chances gratefully seized. Its protagonist is unusually honest and open making this a very revealing and insightful film. It is one of the first original productions from Real Stories and has the feelgood vibe and overcoming of adversity which is part of what characterises this fast-growing documentary channel.
It is also the first commission for Underworld TV, a new independent TV production company bringing ex-offenders and TV talent together to tell authentic stories from the other side of the law.